Books: The Dark Valley

By Piers Brendon

The 1930s witnessed the storm before the storm. The Great Depression destroyed lives and hopes in the U.S. and abroad. Exploiting Germany's old hatreds, Hitler began practicing the inflammatory preachings that set his nation on the path to an unimaginably destructive war. Elsewhere, Stalin tightened his barbaric grip on the U.S.S.R., an expansionist Japan invaded China, and Spain plunged into prophetic civil war. Page by page (800 of them), this synoptic tour de force by a British historian propels the reader toward the inevitable cataclysms of the '40s.